Sober Sunday Reflections on...Generation Identity Crisis

My posts lately have leaned less towards “light and breezy” pop-culture analysis and more towards “old man shaking his fist at a world he doesn’t understand.” I think I’m turning into Clint Eastwood—which is what I think naturally happens the longer you live and the more you see trends come and go. It could be that, previously, in the Fitzgeraldian salad days of my youth, everything was new to me: punk rock, alternative culture, indie culture, J.D. Salinger—and pop culture in general. Now, I get the feeling--not that I’ve seen it all--but that it’s all slowly (but surely) devolving. We, as a culture, who expresses itself via creative content, have gotten dumber—more to the point—or, where there’s no point to make, we hijack someone else’s point and reshape it into cutesy, little post-modern homages (Super 8 anyone?) or heavily inter-referential and uber-self-conscious reconstructions of things that worked in the past—things that resonated with us so profoundly, that we decided to try to recreate them without offering anything new.
 
Of course, by this I’m referring to the recent trend of shitty re-makes and pop culture products which rely more on style (imitating an idealized version of a past style) instead of saying something new—something you find especially in the “indie” sphere, where bands like Yuck, doing a spot-on impression of Dinosaur Jr., or so many nameless synth-pop bands, doing spot-on impressions of the nauseating music I used to hear in the mall when my mom used to drag me along on weekend shopping trips in the 80’s and early 90’s, are re-contextualizing or re-appropriating (if you’re nasty!) a very specific aesthetic that belongs to a very specific albeit already-here-and-gone time in pop-culture.

2013 a.k.a. "the Ironic 80's"

I’m not opposed to recontextualization—sometimes recasting something in a different light can yield really interesting results (see: the work of Quentin Tarantino), but I feel like, anymore, we—again, as a culture—rely too much on saying what’s already been said because it’s easier than saying something “new”—insofar as anything can be “new.”
 
When I go to hip places or, to the mall, even, I see younger people imitating something—trying for a certain look—playing dress-up like X figure from such-and-such era. Meanwhile, 2013 sits in the corner, a blank and dusty blanket-covered canvas upon which we throw up all the culture we’ve already taken in: from garage pop to grunge to synth pop to kids trying to look like Ryan Gosling in that Drive movie, itself a stylized throwback to a style that exists in the past.

"Pre-ripped jeans? Pre-ripped puh-leez. This shirt is covered in the blood of the original dude who fucked the monkey and started AIDS."

I know it’s dangerous to speak in absolutes. Of course, people are making new things. And new voices are expressing themselves in new ways. Not everyone is a pop-culture obsessed, super-aware hipster. But, by and large, I feel like we are a throw-up culture—more content to spatter retro-puke on the aforementioned blank canvas than take in something new—what’s currently happening—and shit-splatter that on the canvas. The problem with this is that, when we look back at the 2010’s (and the latter half of the aughts), we won’t have anything to point to—that we can say, perhaps with a bittersweet tinge in our grandma and grandpa voices, “Yep. That was the 2010’s.” Instead, we have a reiteration of everything from the 60’s to the 90’s, co-existing, like a Tumblr page, as a sort of collection of images that point to things we remember fondly (or pretend to remember fondly) about the past: shaggy hair from the 70’s, tight greaser jeans from the 50’s and 60’s, droopy Madonna shirts that dangle off the shoulders of affected hipster girls, right below their big, clunky 80’s earrings, etc. Whereas, with my parents, I was able to look at past photographs and see them wearing bell-bottoms or my dad with a moustache and shaggy hair and laugh because, in the pictures, it looks so era-specific—we won’t be able to do that with our kids. True, we have the same era-specific mustaches and shaggy hair, but it’s not the same. “Daddy,” our kids will say, “You had a goofy mustache—just like grandpa’s!” “Yes,” we’ll say, “But mine was ironic!”

I guess my point is: how is the age of irony going to look when the age of irony is over—does irony make sense to future generations? It’s interesting, because: to my knowledge, we are the first generation, decade, era, what-have-you, defined by irony. We are the first generation not living in the present—our collective identity is instead pieced together from the ephemeral scraps of past generations, idealized or otherwise. I’m ok with this—but it’s a headache trying to explain (to myself mostly) our generation and what we stand for and I’ve spent way too many hours in my head trying to make sense of us—of what we are and how we’ll be remembered.

Pictured: the fondly-misremembered AIDS Era

We’ve had our fair share of era-defining milestones—from 9/11 to the first black president to the tech boom of the past twenty years or so—but our reaction to these events, it seems, when compared to how past generations reacted to their major era-defining events (WWII, Vietnam, etc.), seems so lackluster. We are a passionless generation—a generation staging hippie sit-ins on Wall Street, not so much because we think it will affect anything, but because…it’s something to do--and, in its own post-post-modern way, a cutesy throwback to 60’s protests, replete with all the folky sing-alongs and silly idealism.
 
Maybe our generation truly is smarter than our parents’ generation. We know that, even in numbers, we cannot change the unchangeable: politicians will always be corrupt, wars will always be fought under false pretenses and no matter how “good” we try to make the world, there is an inherent “bad” side that must prevail (we’ve seen enough Batman movies and cartoons to know this truth to be self-evident). More importantly, we realize, by seeing how our parents’ hippie idealism turned into staunch baby boomer conservatism, that being idealistic is a trap, because no one ever sticks to their ideals—they get abandoned, discarded like peanut shells lining the floors of tear-in-my-beer honky-tonks all across Middle America, and, in their place: a more self-realized, teetering on too-self-aware, pragmatism crunches those shells under hard-line, level-headed boots, as we square-dance to the ambivalent chorus sung by the dead and hope-filled voices of our mommies and daddies (or something…).

"Sure, we used to not shave for weeks, go on brain-damaging acid-benders and believe that our voice actually mattered and we could change the world. But...we're mostly into cottages now."

This article was originally intended to deal with the commercialization, monetization, corruption, etc. of nerd culture—and how I think things like the Big Bang Theory are basically the blackface minstrelization of nerd culture, but it instead turned into this: a loose rant about GenMe.
 
So, whatever. You don’t like it—here’s a link tosomething awesome!